Thank you pay pal for having a good customer service where others are deceitful. I doubt very much that this would have happened without Paypal being involved. I raised a complaint on PAYPAL and sent this documentation as evidence.Within 24 hrs the Economist had paid back the money. After the chat you can get a transcript of your char. If the economist customer services make you jump through hoops and then hang up make sure you say you wish to 'cancel your subscription' about 10 times like I did. I would highly recommend anyone wishing to open a subscription to do so through Paypal. UPDATE: Thankfully I paid through PAYPAL. Now I have to waste even more of my time to get 289€!! I would have thought that such a large news outlet would refrain from bullying tactics to keep subscribers on board, but a simple google search on other people similar experiences will inform you that this is not the case. After repeating I want to cancel my subscription multipler times (with a chat log to prove it!) and sending emails to the Economist, which were return with the 'we no longer use this email' message - they STILL booked another years subscription via PAYPAL. If you refuse to engage in such tactics then the chat bot / person just hangs up and actions none of your requests. Hard selling tactics are used to engage you in a 'nice chat' as the process will 'take some time'. The cancellation process is deliberately misleading and forces you to the chat or call service. Impossible to cancel the subscription without jumping through hoops. What improvements? How long does it take to add a 'cancel' button on the account page? This is a deliberate effort to make cancellation difficult. Also I note that the Economist has been saying since the start of the year that 'they're making improvements to the cancellation process'.

You literally have to repeatedly say 'Please cancel my subscription' 'No thanks, please cancel my subscription, and 'Can you confirm you've cancelled my subscription' like a robot, before they'll cancel it. I ask them to explicitly cancel my subscription, they then start offering me 'refunds' (after which I would switch to some other subscription) - 'you can always come back and cancel if you don't like it!'. After about ten minutes of this they said 'so is there anything else I can help you with', I said 'have you cancelled my account?', 'no because your query was about auto-renewal and we can't turn that off'. They then proceeded to give me about three different offers to which I said 'no thanks'. They started small talk, and 'how I was finding the service', etc. I asked the rep to turn off my auto renewal.

As a side note: I make it a point to never subscribe to services if I find out you have to jump through hoops to cancel. There's no button to cancel on the website and you have to phone or use live chat. I wanted to cancel my auto renewal, as I don't have as much time to read the articles anymore.

I never read the economist